According to this specific calculation. He does say his all things considered view is like 5x the cost.

The calculation would be pretty straightforward: 

3.5 days mean, let's assume another 2 days or so in terms of sickness, so 5.5 days lost in total for 1M microcovids. 

5.5 days = 130 hours

Which implies that ~7600 (1MM / 130) microcovids is ~1 hour of life lost.

Shouldn't be too hard, but seemed worth testing whether it was working in a low-tech solution before we build a thing. My guess is we will add this more properly relatively soon, if we keep doing it.

One of the reasons for this is that curated posts get emailed out to a few thousand people and that email doesn't include any comments, and frequently others have asked us for context on why we curated something when they get the email. So this way the curation notice gets to be included in the email.

Sometimes Eliezer's posts are amazing, sometimes they are only OK. Saturating the karma system would get rid of the distinction between those, and also break any sorting we might want to do on the frontpage based on karma.

Yep, the author's vote-strength is used for the initial vote. So comments by users with more karma can start out with 2 points, as opposed to the default 1, and posts by users with more karma can start with up to 10 points.

Mod note: This... is not an appropriate level of response for the forum. The above comment does not indicate that it's author "believes every article written about everything". Take this as a mod warning, more comments like this and we might ban you.

I think voting should happen primarily based on quality of contribution, not norm violation. For norm violations you can report it to the mods. I think it's pretty reasonable for some comments that don't violate any norms but just seem generically low quality to get downvoted (and indeed, most of the internet is full of low-quality contributions that make discussions frustrating and hard to interact with, without violating any clear norms, and our downvote system holds them at least somewhat at bay). 

There is no automatic voting routine. But all comments start with a single small-upvote by their author, and posts start with a single strong-upvote by their author.

Done

Huh, that's really interesting. Do you have any sources around this? That sure could introduce some big shifts in the EV.

See also this question, which asks the same question and comes with a $1000 bounty for the best answers: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fBGzge5i4hfbaQZWy/usd1000-bounty-how-effective-are-marginal-vaccine-doses 

Oops, indeed. Fixed.

Huh, interesting, I haven't heard of this. Do you have a source handy?

I usually associate things like "being evil" more with something like "part of my payoff matrix has a negative coefficient on your payoff matrix". I.e. actively wanting to hurt people and taking inherent interest in making them worse off. Selfishness feels pretty different from being evil emotionally, at least to me.

Parallel HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27848186 

Oh, well, I definitely didn't get that reference. But that definitely makes me more sympathetic to the title.

Would the title of this just be better as "What would it look like if AGI was near?". I feel a bit confused what the additional "if it looked like" clause is doing.

I also found these very valuable! I wonder whether a better title might help more people see how great these are, but not sure.

Mod note: For critiques like this, please give more context or background. Disagreement and critiques are really useful, but they are very hard to engage with when they give this little context. In my experience, comments like this can cause quite a bit of stress for both readers and authors, and I would really like to avoid that on LessWrong, so try to outline at least a basic argument for why you believe something when you disagree, or alternatively add a meta-comment of the form "I don't have time to write up my reasons for believing this, but I am overall pretty confident that this would reduce tax revenue. Sorry that I don't have time to write up the arguments for this, but I think that's a major obstacle to this being a good idea, and it seemed good to voice my take even if I can't give more context", or something like that.

Oh, yeah. I tried to scroll, but on a desktop clicking and dragging wasn't something I considered.

I was unable to read all the quotes. At least one of them was cut off on the right side: 

I also couldn't find any way to scroll to make the quote visible.

Replaced the image in the post with this image.

This FB post by Matt Bell on the Delta Variant helped me orient a good amount: 

https://www.facebook.com/thismattbell/posts/10161279341706038

As has been the case for almost the entire pandemic, we can predict the future by looking at the present. Let’s tackle the question of “Should I worry about the Delta variant?” There’s now enough data out of Israel and the UK to get a good picture of this, as nearly all cases in Israel and the UK for the last few weeks have been the Delta variant. [1] Israel was until recently the most-vaccinated major country in the world, and is a good analog to the US because they’ve almost entirely used mRNA vaccines.

- If you’re fully vaccinated and aren’t in a high risk group, the Delta variant looks like it might be “just the flu”. There are some scary headlines going around, like “Half of new cases in Israel are among vaccinated people”, but they’re misleading for a couple of reasons. First, since Israel has vaccinated over 80% of the eligible population, the mRNA vaccine still is 1-((0.5/0.8)/(0.5/0.2)) = 75% effective against infection with the Delta variant. Furthermore, the efficacy of the mRNA vaccine is still very high ( > 90%) against hospitalization or death from the Delta variant. Thus, you might still catch Delta if you’re vaccinated, but it will be more like a regular flu if you do. J&J likely has a similar performance in terms of reduced hospitalizations and deaths, as the UK primarily vaccinated its citizens with the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is basically a crappier version of J&J, and is still seeing a 90+% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated population. [2]

[...]

Do you have a new probability?

Ah, that section is a random sample of posts that you haven't read, weighted slightly exponentially by their karma. So any frontpage post can show up in that section.

I'm not sure why this is pinned.

Not sure what you mean by this?

Seems great to me. I will revisit it in a month or so and see whether it has reached critical mass.

I think we should just delete this tag for now. There are three posts, and two aren't even a good fit.

Huh, amusing. We do ship a font that has nothing but the greek letter set in it, because people use greek unicode symbols all the time and our primary font doesn't support that character set. So my guess is that's where Google gets confused.

Promoted to curated: I really liked this post. I've had some thoughts along similar lines for a while, and this post clarified a bunch of them in much better ways than I have succeeded at so far. It also seems like a pretty important topic. Thank you for writing this!

Minor meta feedback: I think it's better to put the "Comprehensive Information Gathering" part of the title at the end, if you want to have many of these. That makes it much easier to see differences in the title and skim a list of them.

Yep, markdown has footnotes. It's been on my to-do list for a while to add footnotes to the WYSIWYG editor, it was just a bit of an annoying UI challenge.

Some relevant links: 

• https://www.openphilanthropy.org/sites/default/files/Lipsitch%201-29-14%20%28public%29.pdf
  • OpenPhil conversation notes from 2014 with Lipsitch
• https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/biosecurity/harvard-university-biosecurity-and-biosafety
  • Grant to Lipsitch in 2020 for ~$320k
• https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants
  • All OpenPhil grants in the biosecurity area

Don't think they prove anything, but seem useful references.

I feel like this just happened? There was a good amount of articles written about this, see for example this article by the Global Priorities Project on GoF research: 

http://globalprioritiesproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GoFv9-3.pdf 

I also remember a number of other articles by people working on biorisk, but would have to dig them up. But overall I had a sense there was both a bunch of funding and a bunch of advocacy and a bunch of research on this topic.

I edited it

Having someone else proofread it, or just generally give style feedback, is often quite valuable. You can post in the Open Thread with a link to a Google Doc, or you can ping me on Intercom, and I can take a look and suggest any obvious improvements that stand out.

Also, there is value to independently posting a link to your essay via other non-LW channels. E.g. sharing it on Facebook or Discord or wherever you might find others interested in it.

I am from germany, and I don't really agree with this assessment of the crust being the tastiest part. People definitely told me that many times, but I think it does just seem straightforwardly wrong by my own taste. I do still usually eat the crust though.

The newsletter is back! I missed these! Glad to have these back.

Invited!

There is a private FB event I am invited to and I can invite you to. I don't think we're friends on FB, so if you have FB, you can add me, and then I can invite you: https://www.facebook.com/oliver.habryka/ 

Promoted to curated: I've had a number of disagreements with a perspective on AI that generates arguments like the above, which takes something like "ownership of material resources" as a really fundamental unit of analysis, and I feel like this post has both helped me get a better grasp on that paradigm of thinking, and also helped me get a bit of a better sense of what feels off to me, and I have a feeling this post will be useful in bridging that gap eventually. 

It's a bit janky, but I've gotten it to work by selecting the text between the two vote symbols. Definitely not as accessible as I would like though.

This is a great comment! Thank you for writing it! 

This seems like potentially a big deal: https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1402062059890786311

> Troubling—the worst variant to date, the #DeltaVariant is now the new fastest growing variant in US. This is the so-called “Indian” variant #B16172 that is ravaging the UK despite high vaccinations because it has immune evasion properties. Here is why it’s trouble—Thread. #COVID19
 

This also summarizes a lot of my take on this position. Thank you!

I do think "non-member AIAF" account is a useful abstraction, just one we haven't leveraged very much. But, for example, it does allow you to respond to comments on your post on the AIAF, even if you are not a member. So the signup does make sense.

My general philosophy for things like this is "do it in-house for a while so you understand what kinds of problems come up and make sure you have a good experience. After you really have it down maybe consider outsourcing it, or requesting volunteer labor for it." 

So I think eventually asking for a more crowdsourced solution seems reasonable, though I think that would come a few months after. 

I literally 2 minutes ago created the June Open thread for this year and pinned that one. So if I were you I would probably repost this there instead of here: 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QTyMwaezwDiYoyAop/open-and-welcome-thread-june-2021 

Yeah, I was proposing something like this in this comment response to Peter.